The QuAC query-answer pairs are collected in a process that involves facilitating information-seeking conversations between two crowd workers, a teacher and a student, who discuss a section from a Wikipedia article about an entity [1]}. The student is permitted to see only the section’s title and the first paragraph of the article, while the teacher is additionally provided with full access to the section text. The conversation starts with the student formulating a free-text question (query) from the limited information they have been given. The teacher is not allowed to answer with free text; instead, they must select a contiguous text span in the section. While this decision limits the way answers are generated, it makes evaluation simpler and more reliable. The conversation continues until (1) twelve questions are answered, (2) one of the workers decides to end the interaction, or (3) more than two unanswerable questions were asked.
